The rebuild is crawling along… I think we should be able to have things restored by morning, let's hope it's not too long a night. Why do things always happen when you're on vacation, and why did my business partners (who normally would have dealt with this for me) have to go out of town?

Let's make ourselves feel better with some funmail. I assume that most of you know what the Klez virus is, and how to deal with it. Anyway, one of the things that Klez does is send itself with a fake “From” address picked at random. As such, popular email addresses (such as mine), get “blamed” semi-regularly. Here are a few recent emails I've received about it:

I'm rewriting my scaling routines this morning to use a better filter, and am then finishing the update I started yesterday… I'm also going to go get my mai; I have some packages waiting — however, I can't say I'm looking forward to walking through the sea of Catholic jackasses that think the best way to show their popepride is to wave American flags and chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!” over and over again, and then follow that up with a volley of profanity if you don't join them…

Maybe a piece of funmail or two will make me feel better. This first one is in regards to BME/Risks:

From: "Cynthia" <Bubble_Bath14@***.***> Regarding: Safety Pins

this is the sickest site I have ever seen. you not only scared me out of getting my tounge peirced but i have now decided to take all my peircings out. thanks a lot!!!

OK… Just a couple more, but then I have to get to work. The risks section generates an endless supply of moronic feedback — mostly just from people who want to be smartasses, submitting stupid information… For example,

loss of blood has many many numeorus risks, duh! loosing too much, AIDS, feeling very sick, passing out due to loss of iron, etc.! These are things whomever is working on this page should know. People who read this page should know all the risks, some people needd this very much. I would applaud you if you had some information on this subject due to just using your brain.

From: joe_2_cool@***.*** Risk name: burn / Fireplay

if you play with fire, you're going to get burned. someone who wants to play with fire around their genitals is a brave person in my opinion! personally, i wouldn't want to run this risk of burning my penis off and never being able to have a GOOD sexual experience for just one night of plessure.

Yeah, thanks a lot Einsteins. Finally, I like this message a lot mostly for its crazy layout:

From: richard t hunt <at3hunt@***.***> Subject: No subject

i want to get my eye brow pierce but i heard that it hurts its not like your piercing but do you got a pics to show that i my not want that pierce

I'm off to do some work… Now… What's best… I'm currently using area averaging, but could bi-linear, bi-cubic, box filter, triangle filter, Hamming, Gaussian, bell filter, B-spline, cubic filters, Lanczos3, Mitchell, sinc filter, Hermite, Hanning, or Catrom filtering… Time to run some tests!

If a friend of yours says to you “Hey — I got blocked* from someone's page. Can you go to their page and send me a copy of their diary?“, the only answer that won't get you removed from the site is “NO“. Feel free to ignore that warning if you don't mind being deleted. Anyway, I thought that this might amuse some of you — it's a scan from one of my old “idea” sketchbooks from early 2000.

I'm pretty sure that was the first time I'd started to plan what was to become iam.bmezine.com… And yes, I really do design everything on paper. Even things like data structures are written by hand first, and then entered into the computer.

* Note that the new block features I'm working on allow you to block not only a specific user, but a specific user PLUS everyone on their buddy list as well (you won't be shown the contents of their buddy list).